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Wednesday, August 20, 2008

A Tale of Two Skirts

The mini wardrobe entry is going to consist of the Chanel jacket, a top and two skirts. I was going to make one skirt and a pair of pants, but I have quite a few pants and I'm trying to get into wearing more skirts. Besides, the one skirt I really wanted to make had to be brown, and I just didn't see myself getting a lot of wear out of olive green pants. Maybe I would, but the fabric definitely would rather be a skirt.

The first skirt is BWOF 8/08 #121, the fitted skirt with the godets at the bottom. The photo in the magazine caught my eye - it actually shows the skirt instead of hiding it - and the line drawing was even better. I liked that the godets were cut with the skirt, rather than having separate godet pieces which are always such fun to line up. The skirt ended up really full at the bottom, but quite fitted at the top. Actually, what I put in the review (drafted, but not yet up) is that this is a booty skirt. Seriously. If you have one and want to conceal it in any way, find another pattern. If you have one and want to show it off, or if you don't have much and want to make it look better, get your tracing paper now. Seriously.

The second skirt is BWOF 2/08 #111, the pencil skirt with the sewn-on bands. I didn't like this at all in the magazine when it came out. But then again I didn't really like anything in that issue, and now I've made two things and have a few more on the radar. Sometimes it just takes a while to sink in. The original plan was to topstitch the bands in brown, gold and green, to match the jacket and the other colors in the min-wardrobe, but I tried that on a scrap of the fabric and just didn't like it. Topstitching in green will at least give me the option of wearing the skirt with different things.Both of these skirts fit without alteration in a size 38, which makes me happy. Usually I have an issue with BWOF skirts in that while I may have hips, they are apparently not in the same place that BWOF thinks they should be, because I always need to adjust the hip curve. Not this time. I think for the brown skirt there were just so many pieces it gave a really flattering fit without having to tweak. For the green, I'm not so sure, I think it might have been that the skirt darts were actually horizontal, and are hidden behind the bands, instead of the usual vertical darts. There are no darts at all in the skirt back, just a wide back yoke that meets up (or almost meets up, depending on which side of my skirt you're on) with the front bands.

So I guess doing these two skirts isn't really repeating myself - they really don't have much in common, except that they fit and I like them.